Find the shortest distance from a to b in the diagram below.

Amira is painting a rectangular banner 2 1/4 yards wide. the banner will have a blue background. amira has enough paint to cover 1 1/2 square yards of the wall. the school colors are blue and yellow, so amira wants to add yellow rectangles on the left and right sides of the blue rectangle. the yellow rectangles will each be 3/4 yards wide and the same height as the blue rectangle. what will be the total area of the two yellow rectangles?

Acaterer knows he will need 60, 50, 80, 40 and 50 dinner napkins on five successive evenings. he can purchase new napkins initially at 25 cents each, after which he can have dirty napkins laundered by a fast one-day laundry service (i. e., dirty napkins given at the end of the day will be ready for use the following day) at 15 cents each, or by a slow two-day service at 8 cents each or both. the caterer wants to know how many napkins he should purchase initially and how many dirty napkins should be laundered by fast and slow service on each of the days in order to minimize his total costs. formulate the caterer’s problem as a linear program as follows (you must state any assumptions you make): a. define all variables clearly. how many are there? b. write out the constraints that must be satisfied, briefly explaining each. (do not simplify.) write out the objective function to be minimized. (do not simplify.)

Suppose the equation ||x-a|-b|=2008 has 3 distinct real roots and a not =0. find the value of b.